Labour says universal credit will take 495 years to roll out as costs rise £3bn

Cost of Iain Duncan Smith’s troubled plan for benefits rises to £15.8bn as Major Projects Authority report reveals HS2 also among schemes at high risk of failing.

The overall cost of Iain Duncan Smith’s key welfare scheme appears to have risen by £3bn to £15.8bn in two years, according to an official report that shows several other significant government programmes are also in danger of collapsing.

Universal credit, the troubled programme that plans to roll six welfare benefits into one payment, has also suffered a further year’s delay and will not be fully implemented until 2020.

The figures are disclosed in a Major Projects Authority report. It also shows that more than half of all of the government’s leading projects, including HS2, are in danger of failing.

According to the report, the “total budgeted whole-life costs” of universal credit will be £15.84bn and will be completed in April 2020.

In 2012, the estimated cost for universal credit was £12.85bn. No figures were available in 2013 because Duncan Smith was forced to reset the entire scheme.

The scheme, championed by Duncan Smith with David Cameron’s support, received royal assent in 2012 with initial plans for a full roll-out by the 2015 general election.

A pilot scheme has been introduced in selected areas, but only 65,000 people in the UK are currently claiming universal credit, according to government data.

Stephen Timms, the acting shadow work and pensions secretary, called for the government’s spending watchdog, the National Audit Office, to review the management of the scheme.

“These new figures have shown how wrong Iain Duncan Smith is to claim universal credit is ‘on time and on budget’. It will take 495 years to fully roll out universal credit at the current rate,” he said.

Today we have this (first spotted in the unemployed’s favourite daily, the ‘I‘)

A report ordered by the Government on the effects of the so-called bedroom tax was quietly released on Thursday.

It found that the removal of the spare room subsidy – otherwise known as the bedroom tax – has increased hardship among those affected, with nearly half reporting that they had to cut back on food spending to cope, a Government-ordered study has revealed.

Three quarters of people affected by the changes regularly run out of money by the end of the week or the month, the study found.

It also reveals that only a third of people affected who applied for emergency support to pay the rent received any help.

Three-quarters of people affected by the bedroom tax say they have had to cut back on food, an independent evaluation published by the Department for Work and Pensions has found.

The research found that 46% said they had cut back on heating, 33% on travel and 42% on leisure. Among a control group of tenants unaffected by the bedroom tax, far fewer – 56% – said they were cutting back on food because of benefit changes.

The findings by the Cambridge Centre for Housing and Planning Research and Ipsos Mori were slipped out by the government on the last day of parliament before the winter break, along with a deluge of more than 380 other documents.

Its study found landlords were very concerned that some tenants were “in severe poverty and unable to pay the shortfall”. The report said 78% of claimants who were still affected by the bedroom tax after two years of the policy were regularly running out of money by the end of the week or month. They tended to pay the rent by using up savings, borrowing from family or friends or accruing debt.

It found that the effects of cutting back “had an impact on some claimants’ health and emotional wellbeing, with the most vulnerable reporting experiences of stress and worry”.

Claimants were able to use savings and borrowings in the first year of the bedroom tax but by the time of the second wave of qualitative research, in autumn 2014, claimants “who had been using their savings for the first year had depleted these and so were having to make greater cutbacks in their household budgets”.

The report found that only one in nine claimants escaped the bedroom tax by moving to a different property, and the vast majority of those affected were still affected nine months later.

Only 5% of those affected by the policy had been successful in finding extra work, of which half said they were then no longer affected by the bedroom tax.

you can count me amongst those – though not as DWP staff expected. 1st sanction yes. Then really Unique stuff coming up on the computer stopping new payments? Then being told original sanction could be rolled into a 4 week one? With no trace/reason for it on computer system. [Thank god I record everything]

Oh and at the end of a week of chasing get text saying failed to reach you – but paying next week. These Frakkers seem to think we are as foolish as them. Mobile phone shows not trace of so called call so they’re lying Frakkers.

Strange how much things have changed.
Now this sort of behaviour from the DWP is regarded as perfectly acceptable, even over Xmas.
This is the deadly result of years of Skiver / Striver targeting of the unemployed, and the disabled.
Not so long ago there would have been public outrage over the way the sanctions regime has been implemented, and the suffering it has caused. Now there is just acceptance.

Gazza, I seen that too, I’ve forgotten where I seen it though! the work programme here which is useless needs to go too. and in every other country. how many more programmes will they think up that won’t work, and what of the soon to be here work & health programme, we can expect their plans too will be a failure. but millions of people will suffer while the programme goes on. which will be worse than of the work programme.

No, that one slipped by me. I look at these scams as just that – scams for the wannabe ConCons, like the Pigs from Spitting Image.

As for MoJ’s so-called Transforming Rehabilitation Programme – its purpose is to keep the criminals busy after release & frustrate them so they go straight back in – justifying more crack downs on the “Crim Yut’h” blighting our fair land.

Crock the lot of it – simple way of lowering crime is to acknowledge that 1/3 to 1/2 of prisoners cannot read or write, of course if you’re on MoJ’s Transforming Rehabilitation Programme there’ll be no time off for that silly stuff off to the chain gang for you.

“had an impact on some claimants’ health and emotional wellbeing, with the most vulnerable reporting experiences of stress and worry”.

Making people ill costs money too.Those on benefits are being used a punch bag for abuse,elsewhere they are not getting away with it.

Its nothing but proganda whipping up public emotions ignoring the facts what they have done now has backed themselves into a corner with the EU and the pointless referendum,more money wasted trying to look good.Once again the UK is the laughing stock because of the loony right.

So paying a wage people can live on, like be able to eat, put a roof over their heads comes AFTER profits for companies. Am I Surprised? Nope. I’ve always thought that the Capitalist System would collapse – with this news it just means its going to happen a lot sooner than I thought.

Just learned DWP [more likely Maximus I suspect] are issuing questionnaires one after the other to those on incapacity benefit which have slightly different wording in each to catch people out by confusing them – mental health seem to be being targeted here.

As reported on RT the company sacked two of its own security men from an airport job for failure to remove there beards. Although the company never said it, its known the intention was born out of the fear they looked like terrorists with one statement quoting, ” trimming your beard wont make you a bad Muslim” and to none the less a person who wasn’t even a Muslim.

A Muslim man only the other day was thrown off a train all because a member of the European public thought he was suspicious all because he closed his laptop when the guy who reported him stood next to him on a crowded train.

Parasite employment agency’s like Alexandre Fisher out source payment to payroll company’s and when you are not paid refer you to them for pay shortages or non payment I strongly advise anyone do not work for this company